


there's a little black hole in my golden cup

by Analyse (D_Willims)



Series: it'll still be two days till we say we're sorry [8]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Also I Dislike Patrick And I Refuse To Apologize, And Is Thoroughly Traumatized by Dr. Terminal, Author Has Read Some Comics, But The Relationships Shape Her A Lot, Gen, I Heard A Rumor There's No Incest, It's Really Just About Allison, Some Things Just Stay Broken, There Isn't Enough Allison Angst In The World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 16:50:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18996631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/D_Willims/pseuds/Analyse
Summary: Allison uses her power to get what she wants and it's never enough.





	there's a little black hole in my golden cup

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title from "LA Hallucinations" by Carly Rae Jepsen.
> 
> Series title from "One Week" by the Bare Naked Ladies.
> 
> Series-within-a-series title from "Colors" by Halsey.

Allison is sixteen when she finally _breaks_.

She dreams of blood. It drips like a waterfall from the place where her arm had been and pools on the shiny floor. And she dreams of Dr. Terminal’s wide, giddy grin as he consumes her flesh in front of her. Of screaming and screaming and screaming and never making a sound.

It’s sometime after midnight when she wakes. The house has gone cold and quiet but the city _buzzes_ with life. And Allison’s hands shake when she reaches for the pack of cigarettes and book of matches she’s hidden behind her headboard. She sits in the window sill and looks out over the city. Watches the bright, warm lights twinkling in the inky blackness as she lights the cigarette.

The match burns down to her fingers before she shakes it out. She wonders if she’ll ever _feel_ anything in that hand again.

A beat. She exhales a pool of acrid smoke, still trembling violently. Then, she pushes herself to her feet and changes into her shortest skirt, a halter top that her father can never know about. The dim light from the hall spills in through the open door and she catches sight of herself in the vanity mirror. In the shadows, the scar seems to twist and grow. Allison brushes her thumb along it, still holding the cigarette. For a moment, she considers changing into something that covers it all.

_Wants_ to leave it bare so everyone would know.

Instead, her hand comes to the locket around her throat. She settles on taking that off. It’s not like she’s that person anymore. Luther treats her like she’s fragile, about to break at any second. Like the vase in the hall Ben broke and Five glued back together when they were seven and everyone’s been waiting for Dad to notice ever since.

She’s still waiting for Dad to notice she’s broken and glued back together, too.

Allison swings her legs over the windowsill and presses her bare feet to the metal grating of the fire escape. She stubs the cigarette out on the brick exterior of the building. Breathes in the cold air and looks down the alley. Klaus’s window is open, gauzy curtains fluttering in and out on the night breeze. Any other night, she’d invite him out with her.

Klaus has been even weirder than Luther, though. Ever since he’d come around that corner in the lab, he’s been on the verge of tears. He’s been trying to hide it behind more and more drugs. Sometimes he just presses his face into her neck and shudders and sobs. And she can’t _help_ him anymore.

Tonight, she climbs down the ladder alone. On the cold concrete, she stops to pull on a pair of stilettos. Wobbles. She’s off-balance for the first time she since started wearing heels at thirteen. But she stays upright and smooths down her skirt. Picture perfect again.

Like nothing was ever wrong in the first place.

She’s glad to be alone. Glad to be at the bar where no one recognizes her and sharing a blunt with a woman she barely knows. They never exchanged names and the other woman calls Allison “Janice” for unexplained reasons. Allison tries to play along but all her names come out numbers.

They’re not that close. There’s no reason for Allison to call her anything.

Close to last call, a little high and a little sick, Allison watches the scar unspool. The stitches are gone now but she can still see their impression. Follows the lines as they curl down around her arm to her fingertip. And when she slams her shot glass down, ink-like puddles form under her fingers. She pushes away from the bar.

In a dark corner, she grabs the first person who makes eye contact with her. A boy with sandy hair and dimples. He looks too young to be in a place like this, but so is she even if she feels so old now. She places his hands on her hips, wraps her arms loose around his neck. “I heard a rumor that you think I’m still beautiful,” she whispers in his ear as they sway in time with the music.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he repeats, dutifully. Drops his head and presses a kiss to the ugly scar where original arm meets new, cloned flesh. Presses kisses up her bicep, across her shoulder and collar bone, tracing the line of her neck…

She shivers because she can _feel_ that and shoves him against the wall, captures his lips with hers and kisses him desperately.

And Allison doesn’t know how Dad found her. Only that his grip is like hot coals on one side of the scar when he wraps it around her arm. She thinks maybe he’ll rip her arm free from its stitches when he yanks her away from the boy, and she knows he leaves a fistful of bruises. Why can’t she _feel_ anything?

“I heard a rumor…” she starts. Stops abruptly when the cane crashes into her jaw.

It’s the first, the last, _the only_ time he’s ever hit her. And it leaves her breathless. She’s always been special, always the one who can talk herself out of trouble. (Except when she can’t, except when she’s screaming and screaming and screaming and never makes a noise.) Allison stares up at her father with wide, wet eyes, cradling her jaw. Refuses to let him see her cry.

“You’re making a scene, Number Three,” he says calmly, evenly. It’s so silent in the bar that she can hear his cane pound against the floor, a command as clear as a bell to her ears. He turns on his heel and starts to walk. And like the chastised child she is, she follows after him. She has to pull her stilettos off and carry them to keep pace but she will not let him see her falter.

Allison keeps her steps deliberate and even as she brushes past him and goes up the stairs. She knows the routine. And she refuses to see her act like a petulant child. Because she’s not Five and she’s not Klaus and she will not give into these games.

Luther waits in the space between their rooms, somehow small inside the shadows. He reaches out to her and almost touches her arm. The pads of his fingers _almost_ brushing up against her skin. He stops himself and she hates him just a little bit. “Allison…” he starts but she doesn’t want to hear it.

“Shut up,” she snaps. She steps out of his reach and into her room. For the first time in years, she slams the door shut behind her.

When she dreams again, she dreams of blood drying on the floor. And of dust in the air, settling over everything. Dr. Terminal’s scared eyes, wide as saucers, and the blood still dripping from his lips. Of the determined clench to Luther’s jaw as he steps through the hole in the wall, as he frees her from the binds. The way he’s so careful not to touch her, not to hurt her. Not to even look at her.

“Look at me,” she screams and screams and screams and never makes a sound. She realizes only too late that she still has the gag in her mouth.

It’s not yet dawn when she packs up everything she can carry and sets out through the window one last time. She’s not running away, she’s moving on. This is what sixteen-year-olds are supposed to do. The word is a big place and there has to be something more for her out there. And she’s determined to find it when she boards the bus heading west.

Hollywood is a natural fit for Allison, in a way that home never was. Everyone around her seems to have that same aching void deep inside them. They all paint over it with make-up and pretty little lies, too. It’s all superficial and shallow and so _safe_.

On the set of her first movie, Allison meets a make-up artist. A beautiful woman with long, delicate fingers. She shows Allison how to cover up the scar with gentle strokes of the sponge during the day and at night she paints ocean waves across Allison’s back. Her lips are soft and taste like pears. And, for a moment, Allison thinks she could stay like this forever.

When the movie ends, though, so do they. And it’s onto the next project, the next dalliance.

The days blur together and then she’s seventeen. She’s sitting alone in her apartment, with all the doors and windows thrown open. And it’s not enough to stop the walls from creeping up on her. To stop her from being crushed under the weight of her own loneliness.

Allison’s never really been _alone_. She’s been terribly, desperately lonely, back home, here and now. But she’s never been _alone_. Not with six siblings in her space, vying for the same small amount of attention, nor in the endless crush of networking and shooting days. Being lonely is harder alone, she thinks. And she’s drunk enough off free cosmos and the knowledge she’s too broke for groceries that she picks up the phone.

Diego answers and fuck her luck.

“I miss you,” she starts. Because it’s true and she doesn’t know what else she can possibly say to him. There’s no apology she can give and nothing for them to talk about. They’re practical strangers. And still she misses him, misses all of them deep in her bones.

“Yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have abandoned m-.” Diego stutters, pauses.

Silently, Allison _dares_ him to say the word. Because he’s bitter; of course, he’s bitter; Diego is always bitter. So fragile around the edges she thinks he might break at any moment. But she can hear the hurt in his voice and she thinks maybe if he admits it, she could go home again. Or make a new home here.

“M-us the first time it got hard. Just couldn’t stand not being Daddy’s Golden Girl.”

Even if she wants to, she couldn’t disguise the little hysterical giggle that bubbles in her chest. The _first time_ it got hard? As if she hadn’t spent as many endless hours pushing past her limits until her muscles were sore and shaking as her brothers. Spent countless afternoons in little boxes, telling bad men to do terrible things to each other, to themselves. Lost her entire childhood to a fake smile in front of a thousand flashing cameras. Allison had never, not once, let that mask slip even when a man took her arm from her.

Even when her father revealed himself the kind of man who could give it back. A mad scientist who kept cloned parts around. No one out in the real world even _knew_.

She should’ve been Number One. Not one step above abject disappointment.

“Fuck you.” She slams the phone against the cradle, leans into the wall and sobs. Her chest aches and she misses him as soon as he’s gone.

That night, she dreams of the lab like always. Looks away from the pool of blood into Diego’s cold, hard, unflinching eyes. He paces and snarls like a wild animal, “You always need the glory, don’t you?” And it’s not what happened, she knows that, because Diego hadn’t been able to say anything. But he keeps talking and talking, vitriol spilling like bile from his lips. “Always have to be the best, but look at you now. Still think you should be Number One?”

When she wakes up, head aching and eyes puffy, she tells herself she’ll never call home again. It was never really home anyway. They were never really a family.

But Allison gets drunk and calls again. Klaus tells her Diego left only days after the last call. _The hypocritical asshole_. And it’s easier to talk to Klaus but they still don’t really say anything. Just exchange gossip and meaningless platitudes. The call ends when Klaus abruptly dissolves into tears.

And she calls again, anyway. Talks to Vanya about the music conservatory and listens as Ben gushes about the crappy studio apartment he’s found. One-by-one, everyone’s leaving. The last time she calls, Allison screws up her courage and asks Luther to move out to LA. To be with her. Because it’s been four years since she stopped him from leaving and he sounds so worn and thin and exhausted. He’s never been able to see the blows coming.

He says he’ll think about it, and maybe he does. But Luther never leaves and Allison is alone.

And then Ben dies.

Klaus falls apart at the funeral and catches himself on her arm. Rubs his hand up and down, crossing over the boundary of the scar. She feels it and it _hurts_. “You are so, so lovely,” he says like it’s the first time he’s ever seen her.

He vomits a bottle of vodka down her dress and presses his face into her neck and sobs. Until he starts to slip from her grasp and Mom comes to collect him. Allison is already on a plane back to Hollywood when Klaus has to have his stomach pumped.

And that night, in a suite in Vegas, with a new ring on her finger and adrenaline pumping in her veins, Allison dreams of the lab for the first time in a long time. Of a goblin of a man who took her arm to save himself. And of Klaus, mouth open wide, vomiting blood all down her front. His hand clinging to her stump of an arm. Ben dies cold and alone and Klaus thinks he’s next.

“Right down the fucking line,” Klaus sobs in her dream, “six, five, four, _three_ …”

But Allison is a survivor.

She presses Klaus’s face into her good shoulder. “I heard a rumor that you don’t want to look,” she screams and screams and screams but never makes a sound.

Allison wakes up with a jolt like she’s been struck by lightning. For the first time in eight years, her hands tremble when she reaches for a cigarette. Patrick’s still blissfully asleep next to her, unburdened by the darkness that coils in her veins. As she lights her cigarette, the thinks—hopes, prays—this wish might not turn out as badly as all the ones that came before.

_I heard a rumor that you love me_.

It’s okay that she doesn’t really love him, she thinks. She’s pretty sure she’s not even capable of love and he doesn’t really love her, either. But he loves the fame and she has plenty of that to go around. And she craves the comforting warmth of another body in her bed. Maybe that’s enough.

Her last life was built with so much less.

She stands, stretches, moves towards the bathroom. Allison closes the door but not all the way before she turns on the lights. In the flood of too-bright light the scar looks like a dark shadow cut across her arm. Like it’s come unstitched where Klaus’s fingers dragged across it and spilled a gaping void out over her body. _Finally_ , she lights the cigarette between her fingers, breathes slowly.

The door to the bathroom creaks open and Patrick slips up behind her. Wraps his arms around her waist and presses his lips against her shoulder. “I never noticed that before,” he whispers into her skin.

Allison meets his gaze in the mirror, grins. It doesn’t reach her eyes but that’s acting. He’s never noticed before, she thinks but doesn’t say, because she’s always kept it covered up. Always hid her pain from a man who never seemed interested. “I heard a rumor,” she says, “that you think it’s dangerous and sexy.”

“Of course, I do,” he replies. “I love you, Allison. All of you.”

And she hates herself.

**Author's Note:**

> The reason I dislike Patrick is this: he sold his daughter's image to a tabloid to drum up sympathy for his divorce. I don't need any other reason. Allison spent her whole life in the spotlight and you can't tell me she's okay with shoving Claire in there. He gives me Reality Star vibes and I'm not here for it.


End file.
